The axe

I set off to my friends' house. On the way, a phone call from the Moldovans.

"What time you coming back?" "Er, well, not until tomorrow night." There is something in Ionache's voice. "OK--I will be there in half an hour."

Their immediate boss at the University has absconded and they won't be getting paid for the second week of the work they flew all the way from Chișinău to do, on the understanding there was six months' work. The replacement manager on the building project has brought his own men with him and has no need for the Moldovans.

In their room, they are carefully tapping out a card's numbers into the computer, buying tickets for the 3am coach to London. There's no work round here, especially not, I imagine, with the prejudice they'll face as soon as they open their mouths.

I can't do anything to help them. I can't let them stay for nothing while they seek work. But I am very sorry for them. They were decent, sociable, civilised, and--although I hesitate to use a once-innocent word which is now pressed into ideological service--hardworking; they don't deserve to be treated in such a heartless way. It's all very well talking about "precarity", the ugly English academic neologism for the way that workers at the bottom tier of Europe's labour supply survive, constantly on the edge of penury, at the mercy of our emasculated employment laws; but when you see its consequences in front of your own eyes, with people you quickly came to like, it's upsetting.

It's shameful that a University which never tires of trumpeting its "international links", can wash its hands of any centrally-controlled contracts with proper, humane terms and conditions that would have protected people like Andrei and Ionache. The University has millions for its endless physical expansion, but not enough to look after the people who put up the walls and put the windows in. I keep looking at the clock, imagining them on that bus to London; their dwindling money pouring away at a ruinous rate of exchange in a tiny room somewhere.

I arrive at my friends' house; the light is lambent, from a lamp hushed with a red cloth. Half-empty wine bottles, cushions, pint glasses, a coffee table stamped with a ringed history of hot drinks. L has that puzzled-looking amphetamined face, as though turning away from a bright light. They've been up all night watching porn, and after twenty minutes or so L is splaying her hands and moving them across the carpet, which I take as indicating that they'd rather resume that than continue with what must feel like dull conversation with me--straight, sober, bringing my worries into the sanctum.

I ring Kim and she starts talking about the poor pickings on the dating site. "It's just the illiteracy," she says. "You can't willingly fuck someone who spells please as 'plz', could you? It'd be a form of bestiality."